After years of legal wrangling, Joyce's masterpiece will be performed on stage
in the city in which it is set.

The words printed on the final page of James Joyce's Ulysses tell a story: "Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921". The great novel about Dublin in 1904 was written while the author was in exile from the city. For many years after its publication it was unavailable in Ireland: the Circe chapter set in Nighttown, a Dublin red light district, and Molly Bloom's sexually tinged monologue were deemed too obscene.

But just as you can't move for statues of Dante in Florence (even though the poet was exiled when he wrote The Commedia), in Dublin the anniversary of Bloomsday on June 16 1904 is feverishly celebrated. Expect more to come now that the troublesome Joyce estate no longer has any power over the writer's work. The Abbey Theatre adapted Joyce's story "The Dead" in December. Last month a version of the story collection from which that story is taken, Dubliners, was put on at the Dublin Theatre Festival.

After an acclaimed BBC radio version earlier this year, and after years of wandering, Ulysses is also coming to the stage. In 1994 the Irish writer Dermot Bolger was commissioned to write an adaptation: it was performed once before copyright laws changed and the production had to be cancelled. Nearly 20 years later, however, the play is being shown in Dublin this week.

"Emotionally for me these performances in Dublin feel almost like James Joyce is finally coming home," said Bolger. "I have read it a number of times now, each time at a different age,” he added. “Like every child in Dublin I got it at 14, thinking that it was a dirty book and was very disappointed."

Last year Andy Arnold, the artistic director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, asked Bolger whether he could now stage his adaptation, which uses eight actors to play 80 characters to bring to life the 265,000-word novel.